Tag Archives: productivity

I really didn’t want to put Fake News in the headline of this post, but really that is what this post is all about. How to use a reverse image search when you are on a mobile device, so that you can spot a Fake News story.

Recently a friend shared a Facebook story that just didn’t add up. The photo was of a man in hazmat style suit purportedly cleaning up an oil spill in North Dakota. You can see a version of the photo at the top of the article. The story implied some type of conspiracy that was preventing news of the oil spill from being covered.

A Reverse Image Search told a different story

This didn’t make sense to me, especially as I had been following news of an oil spill that was not on the scale shown by the photo. However a few minutes with a reverse image search showed the picture had been taken in China, and had nothing to do with North Dakota. This made the rest of the story even more unlikely.

Performing your search

A reverse image search is easy to do on a mobile device although iOS users need to download the Chrome browser app first. Sorry, but Safari doesn’t support Googles image search file upload.

With that in mind here are the steps to performing your reverse image search:

Save a copy of the photo locally, this might mean taking a screenshot depending on the posts’ privacy settings. Here you can see the photo I used. Note that the poster changed the photo to Black and White in order to make it harder to search. Didn’t work though!

Black and White photo of oil cleanup effort – altered from original

Open Chrome and go to www.google.ca

Either google.ca or google.com will work

Click the Images link on the page to go to Image search. Currently that link is in the top right corner of the screen.

You are in Image Search, when the camera icon is in the search bar.

Click the Camera icon to see your options for searching using an image file.
Google Image search options. Search by pasting the URL of the image or by uploading the file.

Choose the Upload an Image tab.

Uploading an Image

Click the Choose Filebutton.

You will be offered a choice of taking a new photo or going to your Photo Library. Select your photo library, and locate the image you saved previously.

The file is uploaded automatically and the search is performed.
Reverse Image Search Results initial screen

Make sure you scroll down the page looking for the Pages that include matching images.

Reverse Image Search – Pages that include matching images.

Reverse Image searches are amazing

Frankly, I was astounded that the image was located even after it had been changed. Reverse image searches are a powerful tool! Whether from malicious intent or the desire to give a story emotional impact, there are all too many posts on the net where images are misused. Don’t be fooled.

I keep a google version of the Prairie Rose School Division school calendar. This is for my own use, and is not maintained by Prairie Rose. However, you are welcome to subscribe to it. Having a subscription calendar certainly makes life easier!

Prairie Rose has published their school calendar until June 2019.

If you are interested in my previous posts about calendar sharing you can check them out here:

Google Maps has added a feature called Pit Stops to its Android and iOS apps.

Pit Stops allow you to add, well, pit stops to a planned route. Once the stop is added; the navigation route updates itself and the length of time the trip will take. Of course, how long you spend at a stop will also impact your trip length, but Google wisely declines to make estimates of that.

To use the Pit Stop feature, you have to enter navigation mode:

Press the Arrow Button to enter Navigation mode

Once in Navigation mode the Pit Stop icon appears as a magnifying glass:

The button to launch the Pit Stops has a magnifying glass icon.

Pressing the Pit Stops button gives you a list of preconfigured searches; Gas stations, Restaurants, Grocery stores and Coffee shops. But there is also a search button for your own custom searching.

The Pit Stop search list view.

If I search for say; Tim Hortons coffee shops along my route, the search will return the coffee shops closest to my planned route, giving an estimate of the amount of time that will be added to my travels.

Pit Stop search results, showing the amount of time each stop will add to the journey.

Select the location of the Pit Stop you want to go to and a confirmation window will open at the bottom of your screen. At this point you can choose to Add Stop or Cancel, which is useful if you were only checking out possible stops along the way.

Use the Add Stop or Cancel options to update (or not) your map.

Exiting Navigation at this point allows you to see the updated time for your journey. Android users are apparently able to add up to 10 Pit Stops to their routes, currently iOS users can only have one.

Google Maps shows the starting point, end point and all the Pit Stops in between.

If you attempt to add a new Pit Stop, you will only see the option to replace the current stop, not add a new one.

The Replace Stop option, tho’ its’ kinda cut off here…

The other challenge for iOS users, is that Pit Stops can only be scheduled during navigation, which means your current location is always factored in. Which can lead to some wacky route planning.

Google Maps shows how to get there, indirectly.

Nevertheless, a really useful feature and, once the iOS version catches up with the Android implementation it will be excellent on both platforms.

Freezing panes is a basic tool to make a large spreadsheet easier to work with. In my social media spreadsheet I like to freeze the header row into position. Then no matter how far I scroll down the sheet, the columns are labelled.

To turn on frozen panes, select the cell below the row & column you wish to freeze into position. Since I don’t want to freeze any columns, I select cell A2.

Freezing Panes using the Active Cell position

Select the View Ribbon, Click on the Freeze Panesbutton, and choose Freeze Panes(or Freeze Top Rowin this scenario).

Freezing Panes Results

Now you can scroll for hundreds of rows, and each column is nicely labelled – no guessing!

The Select Visible Cells Only function is so useful, I like to add it to the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) in Excel. These instructions are based on Excel 2010, but will be similar in all current versions of Excel.

Quick Access Toolbar Customization

The Quick Access Toolbar starts in the top right corner of the Excel window. The customize button is circled in red. Clicking on that button displays the menu shown below.

Move the QAT under the ribbon

The first change I like to make is to its’ position. I like to move it under the Ribbon, since there will be more room for buttons there. Over time I tend to fill the QAT up with frequently used tools.

After I move the QAT below the ribbon, I go hunting for useful commands to add. Click the More Commands… option and the Customize the Quick Access Toolbardialog opens up.

Customize the Quick Access Toolbar – Popular Commands

The dialog box defaults to Popular Commands. Try scrolling through this list and find the Format Painter. Press the Addbutton, to add it to the Quick Access Toolbar. This is a useful tool to have at hand!

By clicking on the Choose commands fromdrop-down list, a selection will be displayed.

Drop-down list of source commands.

Select All Commandsfrom this list. Hundreds of Excel commands will display, and this is where it is useful to know the name of the command you are looking for. Scroll until you find Select Visible Cells.

Finding the Select Visible Cells command

Select it, Click on the Addbutton, and click OK.

Simply select the cells you wish to copy and press the Select Visible Cellsbutton. Paste your information and only what you see will be pasted.

I built my Social Media spreadsheet in an Excel spreadsheet with all the tools I want built in (formulas, conditional formatting and data validation). Ultimately, I will transfer my information into a stripped down spreadsheet in csv (comma separated) format. This is the format that Google Calendars will accept.

When I transfer my posts to this spreadsheet, I don’t want to include any blank rows AND I only want to copy and paste once. How do I perform this little piece of magic? I use the Excel command for selecting visible cells only.

Go To Special Dialog, select Visible cells only

Tucked away in the Go To Specialdialog is the option for selecting only the visible cells in a region. This takes what could be multiple copy/paste operations and condenses them into one step.

First filter your data so that blanks do not appear, then press the F5 function key to bring up the Go Todialog box.

GoTo Dialog – Special Button

Press the Specialbutton to open the Go To Specialdialog box, choose Visible cells onlyand press OK. Now when you copy the selected cells, only the cells you can see are copied.

In my next post I’ll show the method to put this useful button on your Quick Access Toolbar.

Since Excel 2007, the Filter tool has been on the Home ribbon, under the Sort and Filterdrop-down. The Filter tool can be applied to any spreadsheet where every row is a new record. Excels’ guesses about what and how to filter will be more accurate if the data has a header row. Your (human) life will be easier if you give that row a little formatting to make it stand out from the data.

If your data has gaps, select all the data (including the header row) and apply the filter. Once the filter has been applied, little triangles will appear beside each header label.

Filtering Drop-Down panel

Now you can use each header to filter the data. Click on the filter drop-down and the panel will open as you can see in the picture above. Clear the check boxes beside the entries you don’t want to see. Then click the OKbutton. You can spot filtered data, because the row headers will be bright blue (and row numbers will be missing as data is filtered out). The columns where filtering is applied will have a filter icon (circled in red in the picture).

Filtering Applied

Once the filters are in place, I can filter out blanks or filter blanks in to find openings in our social media schedule. I can quickly look for Posts and Tweets with images, to ensure the image information is present. I can filter down to a single subject. All of these filters make managing my posting schedule MUCH easier.

When building my Social Media spreadsheet, I want to enter my subject keywords and trigger keywords consistently. Minor typos can make it difficult to find all the relevant posts and worse; prevent scheduled posts, tweets and pins from being published on time. This is why I find the Data Validation feature in Excel so useful. As you can see in the picture above, once Data Validation is in action, my data entry is restricted to a preset list of options.

Find the Data Validation tool on the Data ribbon

Since Excel 2007, the Data Validation tool has been on the Data Ribbon. Simply select the cells you want to apply Data Validation to and press the Data Validationbutton and select Data Validation. Then the Data Validation Settingsdialogue box will appear.

Data Validation Settings

To keep the active sheet “clean”, I use a named range on another sheet as my data source (I’ve talked about that previously). Here you can see it’s called PostTypes. But you can enter short lists directly into the Source box:

The list entered into the source box, each item separated by a comma.

However, I find in the long run (especially for long lists) keeping the list source on another sheet makes maintenance easier.